Beyond the surface of media disruption: digital technology boosting new business logics, professional practices and entrepreneurial identities

Abstract

Digital disruption has recently been one of the main focal points of media management scholars. Digitalisation is regarded as the main driver of change that results in enormous managerial and organisational challenges. As the evolutionary view of organisational change (Nelson & Winter, 1982; Winter, 2003) tells us, the best and perhaps only way to overcome path dependencies and rigidities that hamper change is to learn new competencies and capabilities and to explore new business models (e.g. Achtenhagen & Raviola, 2009; Doyle, 2015; Järventie-Thessleff, Moisander & Villi, 2014; Maijanen & Virta, 2017; Teece, 2018). Nevertheless, due to organisational inertia, high uncertainty and rapid changes in business environments these challenges still exist and prevail with the risk of causing competence traps and failures. This special issue of the Journal of Media Business Studies looks at the other side of the coin, asking how digital technologies boost change by creating new revenue models and initiating and enhancing new practices and logics in journalism andmedia entrepreneurship. New technology has created many stories of success, such as Netflix being one of the case examples of this special issue (see also Küng, 2015). This special issue features four papers that, in their early versions, were presented at the 2018 annual EuropeanMediaManagement and Association (emma) conference in Warsaw. The papers aim to look beyond the digital disruption on a more micro foundational level using different approaches and theoretical concepts. However, they all tackle the role of digital technology in enhancing and boosting changes in media. Anders Fagerjord from theUniversity of Bergen and Lucy Küng from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford provide an important contribution by analyzing the valuecreating process of streaming video services on the micro-level, drawing on Netflix as a case study. As the authors point out, “streaming services are a new and fast-growing element in media industry”. These services fundamentally change the habits of media users, which in turn changes the whole competitive environment. Based on company and industry reports as well as press accounts, the study provides a detailed analysis of the core actors and flows between the actors. The study shows the nature of these new complex organisations that the authors call “tech-media hybrids” combining characteristics of a network and platform and having a strong grounding on digital technology. The authors also call streaming video services the “new beasts” that are very reliant on external partners. In such hybrid organisations, data flows and analytics constitute a central source of competitive advantage. Juliane Lischka from the University of Zürich provides a fresh approach by applying the concept of institutional logics to her analysis of digital transformation. Following, e.g. Friedland and Alford (1991) and Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury (2012), Lischka defines JOURNAL OF MEDIA BUSINESS STUDIES 2019, VOL. 16, NO. 3, 163–165 https://doi.org/10.1080/16522354.2019.1700095